


"In Defense Of The Perceptions" by earLender

by lucidChthonia (liquidCitrus)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Essay, Replay Value AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-09
Updated: 2013-07-09
Packaged: 2017-12-18 06:28:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/876679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liquidCitrus/pseuds/lucidChthonia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>There was an academic movement before postmodernism called modernism, that said that there was one kind of truth and we needed to find it, and once we did we could have a perfect high-rise future of utilitarian design and one-size-fits-all solutions. There are too many people in the world, with too many subtly different points of view, with too many definitions of truth, with too many cultures and overlapping different experiences and neurologies, for that to possibly be right.</i>
</p><p>An exploration of the aspect of Sight and its relationship to art (which is very different from Dreams' relationship to art). Written within the <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/340777/chapters/551606">Replay Value</a> universe, though draws on a minimum of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	"In Defense Of The Perceptions" by earLender

**Author's Note:**

> This took me entirely too long to write.

[essay] **In Defense Of The Perceptions**  
 _by earLender_

\----

For a native Void, they say, it's often wondered why I care so much about why things are the way they are. I assumed for a long time that the Game decided it wasn't an important enough part of me to acknowledge, at least until recently.

I was also recently linked to a theory put forth by larynxLithosphere (a lovely young man - if you can get past his Mannerist heterodoxy), which states that Void is sometimes given to those intended to be Natives of aspects that do not exist yet. For whatever reason. I'm torn between deeming this "wishful thinking" and ignoring it, and telling you that I feel that it holds a grain of truth, at least about the way I think about Sight, and the way I think about the world. But that's not what this post is about.

This post is about modern art.

Yes, I know most of you subscribe to the way existentialExternality put it, that art is an activity done for the sheer joy or the sheer need to do it, because inspiration springs eternal. This as opposed to being used to inform, or entertain, or persuade. A novel without an audience to it is, let's face it, pretty damn near useless - whatever effects it may have had on the writer could just as well be replicated by a good few sessions with a skilled Mind player. And even the most hard-line Dreams players will acknowledge that there is such a thing as an audience, and even (gasp) that some people will write to be understood by that audience. To say nothing of being praised for it.

Sight is, as far as I can tell, an aspect of perception. Of perception and the way things are, and the way things could be, and the power of metaphor, and the power of art. So let's start with the pipe.

\----

[Ceci N'est Pas Une Pipe] is an ability name. It is also the inscription on a painting from my Native, called "The Treachery of Images", by René Magritte. The painting is of a smoking-pipe, under which it is proclaimed that "This is not a pipe." At this point someone will say "but universal differences!" and argue something about the fact that sometimes it's not called a pipe in different universes. Or something. Which is technically true, but irrelevant.

My point here is that the painting is not the pipe. The painting represents the pipe. The painting represents a pretty decent-looking pipe, buffed smooth, one my father would be proud to own. But you cannot take the painting, pack it with tobacco, and put it in your mouth.

Therein lies the fundamental paradox. The representation is not the reality. Art is not, and it can never be, life itself.

However, I would like to posit that one thing art can do is show a version of the truth that emphasizes a different view, a different version of events. A text, even in the most eloquent of words, lies inert without a reader; all the effort that went into a painting is useless if the canvas is unstapled, scraped clean, and used to cushion furniture in a moving truck.

And one of the ways that art shows its power is in metaphor.

\----

As such, the main star of the show, the unnamed heart of affairs for a Sight player, which I have taken the liberty of dubbing the "Fuckoff Symbolism Zone" in casual conversation. Its purpose is to show a metaphorical view of the state of affairs. For example, someone mentally chained to their past would show a ball and chain around their ankle, which can be broken. Or a knife implicated in a murder could drip with symbolic blood. As a strict freestyler for going on five sessions now, I cannot comment on exact ability names and groupings, but I will tell you that manipulating the FSZ-representation, or substantiating what happens in the FSZ into reality, is really the heart of what the aspect does.

Let me provide an example. A PK seer can scry where her potential victims are, and uses this information to plot murders. I sneak into the FSZ. I see that she has metaphorical daggers tucked into her boots and knives hidden within her coat, both of which show traces of blood; the same blood is seen on the FSZ dagger in my friend's - I mean the victim's - chest. To disable the Seer for long enough that I can get revenge, I take her FSZ crystal ball and smash it to pieces. This prevents her from scrying, which saves my life.

There are other uses - such as tracing the red string that ties together two people who refuse to acknowledge they have romantic chemistry but will likely get together before the end of the session. Or being able to tell that someone with [Even In Death] on is actually a Doomzombie, because of the fact that they do, in fact, literally look like a zombie, arms out and mouth muttering for brains, in the FSZ. The possibilities may not be literally infinite, but the difference between literal infinity and merely an endless combinatorial revolving wheel of possibilities is very little, from our side of the veil.

\----

But you can't understand the art - the film canisters, or the urinals - without understanding the movement and where it came from, either. There was an academic movement before postmodernism called modernism, that said that there was one kind of truth and we needed to find it, and once we did we could have a perfect high-rise future of utilitarian design and one-size-fits-all solutions. There are too many people in the world, with too many subtly different points of view, with too many definitions of truth, with too many cultures and overlapping different experiences and neurologies, for that to possibly be right.

The Modernist ideal was perfectly square concrete-block high-rises and vector graphics and brushed metal and atomic energy and central planning. The Postmodernist ideal is a bazaar, riotous and colorful and chaotic but beautiful all the same in its dirtiness and duplication of effort.

I want the world where everyone is free to have their own opinions of aesthetics and functionality and what tradeoffs they want to make between the two. I want the world to have more than one ideal of beauty. I want the world to stretch my mind in a thousand different directions, for me to struggle to comprehend and others to be free to try to help. If this means that you get occasional quacks in with the real artists, so be it. If this means that I will never truly understand everything that paradox space has to offer? That was never my intention in the first place, so I'm not going to miss it. If this means that everyone needs to expend more effort understanding the world? That's something I'm willing to trade, for the sake of a world that has many people and many different points of view in it. Adaptive radiation, they call it, in biology.

The Postmodernist ideal is achievable, where the Modernist ideal is not and never was. That's why I believe in it.

\----

So, art - art is what I use, to teach you what the inside of my mind looks like, and as we argue with each other about whether it's actually art, I gain insight into the kind of person you are. The people you cite because you read them in middle school and kept the authors and their ideas close to your heart as you navigated adolescence. The subtle assumptions you have about the world because of the way you grew up, tempered but not removed by our common experience in the Game. The way you respond to arguments, the way you respond to prejudice, the way you respond to the unexpected.

And art isn't something that I keep to a gallery. Art is the stencils I cut, through which I spray-paint my blade with angles and splotches that I cannot replicate on the alchemiter, because of limitations in its data forms. Art is the easel-size sticky notes with caricatures of the Queen I leave along the streets of Derse to incite popular opinion. Art is the pop-up tent my best friend designed specifically for use in a Summoning, screened sides and built-in sleeping bag and twenty-second construction speaking of its purpose, clean lines close to the ground and dappled chameleon skin speaking of the land it was created for and the desire to make the Summoning more beautiful, not less. Art is the way that I use parallelism and analogy in this very essay to make my own points powerful. Art is my strange metaphors. Art is the way I have begun to draw the Fuckoff Symbolism Zone representations of things and people that I love. Art is the way I dance to the music that keeps me alive.

Art is everything beautiful, everything ugly, everything meant for someone else to see and notice what they normally would overlook. If the fish anthropologist must strain to recognize water as the substrate for all life she knows, let her create an installation with dye billowing from vents in the seafloor, so that others may watch and understand. This is what Sight exists to do. This is, I even dare say, why Sight exists.

\----

The word "essay" comes from "essayer", in the French - the discovery of truth, not its airtight enumeration. I hope I have helped you discover where my truth comes from. I hope I have helped you understand.

Thank you for reading.


End file.
